ABSTRACT
Like many of the important terms covered in this manual ("bibliography," "book," "text"), the word "printing" can be somewhat ambiguous. In the West, the term is most often associated with Gutenberg's invention and can be regarded as consisting of three separate components: a relief type (letterpress), movable parts (the type pieces), and a press to imprint the negative impression of the type onto paper to produce a positive text. This restricted definition would exclude fifteenth-century wooden block books, for though they did have relief, they had no movable parts, since each page was cut as a single block. It would also exclude modern computer typesetting, which has neither relief nor movable parts. But while the three components are unsatisfactory to cover all types of material that we would conventionally accept as "printed," they make a useful touchstone for charting the early development of letterpress printing in Europe.
